David Magnus and Arthur Caplan
Food for Thought: The Primacy of the Moral in the GMO Debate
- SUMMARY OF RISKS/BENEFITS OF GMOS
- BENEFITS: Definitely are some
- Crops of benefit to farmers
- Foods that have greater nutritional and drug benefits
- Cattle whose milk has medical benefits
- Crops that can grow in places now can't provide enough food for
subsistence
- Microbes that can battle pollutants or dangerous microbes
- RISKS: Food safety and environmental
- Food Safety
- Allergic reactions
- Shellfish gene in tomato lead to new type of allergic reaction
- StarLink: New type of Bt corn that produces a protein that might
help reduce chances of Corn Borer developing resistance to BT.
But it is also a potential allergen. It was approved only for use in
animal feed (and not also in human food) but was found in tacos (and
throughout food supply)
- With all the pesticide producing GMO we eat could have buildup of
harmful poisons in us
- Lewontin: Sticking a gene in a genome could have unintended harmful
side effects, like making the plant produce more of a toxin that it
produced a tiny amount of before.
- Environmental
- Gene migration to weedy relatives could create super weeds
- GMOs could escape and become trouble in new habitats
- Technology that allows agriculture in regions where agriculture could
not naturally flourish could lead to biodiversity and habitat loss (salt
and drought tolerant GMOs)
- Impact of GMOs on non-target organisms
- Bt corn's affect on Monarch butterflies
- GM animals/fish spread genes to wild populations undermining
their type (Aquaculture uses nets to contain GM fish with lots
escaping to wild)
- Killer (Africanized) bees: A lab organism that escaped into the wild
- GM mice and mammals could create pests hard to eliminate
- ISSUES CONCERNING REGULATION OF GMOS
- Are our regulations in U.S. strong enough to catch problems?
(EPA regulates GMOs that express pesticide, FDA regulate
GMOs express nutritional benefit; wouldn't it be better to have a
uniform regulations?)
- Europeans less receptive to GMOs (than Americans) because
they trust their food regulatory systems less (Mad cow disease,
etc.)
- Problems with having unregulated market determine which GMOs are produced
- When market forces alone determine which of these products developed, it is not clear that these benefits will be obtained.
- What the paying public supports or what is profitable for companies to produce may be quite different from the GMOs needed to feed a starving world and different from GMOs U.S. farmers want
- CRITIQUE OF THE RISK/BENEFIT APPROACH
- The consequentialist, utilitarian, risk-benefit approach to the
GMO debate is too narrow and ignores important values at stake
- Makes its seem like the issue depends on getting facts straight
- Suggests science will resolve the issue and provides no role for
non-experts
- Critics of this approach to GMOs are made to look like they are
anti-science
- But even a pure risk/ben analysis involves important value
questions
- How much risk is too much?
- What sorts of benefits are worthwhile and how valuable are they?
- How much uncertainty is acceptable when risk is the issue?
- THREE MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH UTILITARIAN-CONSEQUENTIALIST APPROACH
- One: Requires weighing very different outcomes in commensurable
terms (Problem of Incommensurability of Values)
- E.g., Difficult if not impossible to weigh monetary savings versus
value of health or to find a way to assess the relative value of an
ecosystem
- Two: Often what people care about is not how great the risks and
benefits are, but who bears/gets them and who decides this
- Who should bear risks and who should get benefits?
- How should we decide this?
- People object to being exposed to risk if it is not of their own
choosing and if done for the benefit of others, even if the amount
of risk is smaller than risks they routinely and willingly expose
themselves too
- Smoke cigarettes but get upset by pesticides on apples
- Drive their cars, but worry about nuclear shipment through
town
- Is this irrational or perfectly understandable?
- Often justice and fairness matter more than utility in people's
assessment of technology
- Utility =maximizing overall social well-being
- Justice/fairness: treating people fairly and with respect
- Three: Consequentialism fails to capture many of values at stake in the
debate.
- Consequentialism: Right acts are those with the best
consequences (produce the best results)
- But morality involves more than maximizing best results (e.g., it
requires treating individuals fairly, justly and respecting their
rights)
- PLAYING GOD AND OTHER VALUES
- Negative reaction to cloning Dolly and to GMOs have little to do with
risk/benefits but rather with "moral repugnance" and the alleged
unnaturalness of the act
- Frankenfood: A Promethean act of human hubris (false pride)
leading to our own demise
- Prometheus was a Titan that stole fire from heaven and gave it to
humans
- Arrogance of usurping role of nature and natural design
- Playing
God
- These are the moral values that are expressed by people worried about
GMO
- Those who think about GMOs in terms of risk/benefits tend to be
cautious supporters
- Two ways to think about reaction that GMO's are morally
repugnant, disgusting, creepy, or yucky
- One: This visceral response important for its own sake or captures
whole set of objections that are hard to articulate but clearly perceived
- Two: A sentimental or irrational concern that tends to go away when
people become use to the technology
- "Playing God is a prejudice against the new and unfamiliar"
- Magnus and Caplan think that: Moral sentiments like these are
relevant to the moral issue but they are starting points for
discussion and not end points (as Leon Kass suggests)
- FOUR SENSES OF PLAYING GOD
- One: Hubris (false pride, arrogance)
- There are unintended consequences to biotech and we lack
humility as we transform nature
- Many religious traditions and stories identify disasters that come
about when our hubris leads us to ignore limitations of our
knowledge
- Many traditions see nature as infused with value
- From this perspective, precautionary principle is important
and legitimate (and based in part on moral meaning);
- Be careful about changing (messing with) valuable nature
- Precautionary principle: Burden on those who want to introduce a technology to show it is safe
- Two: Stewardship
- Tension between instrumentalist and preservationist
obligations toward nature and what we are given
- Instrumental: Need to make use of what we are given
- Preservationist: Need to preserve the garden, to
maintain and protect the status quo
- Tension reflects two different views of nature
- Something to be utilized for improvement of life
(instrumental view of nature)
- Acceptance and reverence for the world given to us
(intrinsic value view of nature)
- Caplan/Magnus suggest need proper balance between these two
- Playing God is a function of inappropriate balance that makes us poor stewards
- Any argument that assumes nature should not be
significantly altered fails to recognize this tension and need
for balance
- But arguments that see no limits to the human manipulation of
nature also fail to recognize the need for a proper balance
between these views
- Given the rate at which humans are remaking the world and the
extent of the manipulation already done, "proper balance"
suggests that we need to put more weight on the intrinsic
value/reverence for nature and protect and preserve nature side
- Four: Violating the purity of organisms as they exist
- Is the below really a development of the above claim?
- While human power to create is in God's image, arrogantly
recreating nature to suit our needs usurps God's power
- Suggests that God did not properly create the world and it
requires human action
- Here again is tension between need to improve world we find and
to preserve and protect this found world
- Three: Power/accountability (Science and technology is beyond the
public's control)
- Power here is both economic and knowledge-based
- Unease people feel is not just about what the risks are, but who
controls them, who is exposed to them, who the intended
beneficiaries of the technology are
- Scientific communities and large biotech industries not
inherently democratic institutions
- These institutions not accountable to general public and this
causes great anxiety
- Initial GM foods played into these concerns
- Herbicide tolerant crops (such as round-up ready soybeans)
don't obviously benefit the general public who are exposed
to risk associated with these crops
- Get mistrust of scientific community
- Biotechnology's critics question authority of science to address
issues of risk assessment
- Science as new secular priesthood and authoritarian
structure that has replaced God
- Need to democratize and incorporate values into process of
decision-making about technological matters.
- CONCLUSIONS
- Concerns about playing god are importance and risk/benefit
analysis doesn't address them
- These concerns are religious and moral ones about justice,
benevolence and the moral significance of nature
- They involve core values, religious/spiritual and moral (and
deontological) values, that are not amenable to simple risk/benefit
analysis and the consequentialist mind-set
- Can't "blunt them" by pointing to any amount of relative benefit
that GMOs would create
- MAGNUS AND CAPLAN NOT LUDDITES
- They suggest it is important to proceed with humility, be aware
of the limitation of out knowledge and be cognizant of
importance of questions of justice and power
- They hope that public discussion of these values will allow for
appropriate progress of science and technology